Having not seen the innovation with our own eyes, we are left to presume it does not exist.

Larger iPhones?

Larger iPads?

Meh.

Are you still mad about that whole Apple-suing-you thing?

Where are the moonshots? Where is the innovation?

Where are the Island of Dr. Moreau-esque human/animal mutates? Where is the interdimensional teleportation device? Where are the transwarp drive and the rocket-propelled pants?

A couple of recent headlines got me thinking this way and Cupertino’s lethargic pace of development and innovation is starting to worry me, an Apple customer and enthusiast since the original Mac in 1984 and the Lisa before it.

Seriously, get off O’Grady’s lawn. He’s not even joking about it anymore. He knows those are sneakers but they have a really big tread on them. Shoo.

First came the news that Google had acquired the hotest home automation startup in the valley – Nest Labs …

Then came love, then came marriage, then came all your thermostat settings in your Google+ stream.

But the icing on the cake was that “Apple was not in the mix” and didn’t express any interest in Nest. What? Nest is stocked with most of the Apple engineers that developed the iPod and Apple didn’t even bid?

Pretty sure Apple already has a bunch of Apple engineers who made stuff like the iPhone and the iPad.

Second came the news that Google is developing a glucose monitoring contact lens to help those suffering with diabetes …

And Nest and the connected contacts are just part of the story, look at Google Glass, autonomous vehicles, bandwidth by hot air balloons.

You can look at them, but unless you’re well-heeled or a technologist you can’t actually use any of them.

And it’s not just Google that’s eating Apple’s lunch.

There’s an awful lot of lunch-eating going on, isn’t there? It’s quite possible that there’s so much lunch-eating going on that these companies, you know, forgot that they’re not supposed to be sitting around eating ill-gotten lunches and are supposed to be trying to sell stuff.

Amazon kicked the iPad’s ass in display technology.

Which is almost like kicking its ass in sales. Except the Kindle Fire did not, in fact, kick the iPad’s ass in sales. So, it’s not much like that at all.

And one word: drones.

Four words: ground-to-air missiles.

O’Grady throws Facebook and Twitter on this bonfire of the inanities before he gets to Microsoft, of all companies. Really.

Maybe Windows 8 isn’t a complete home run …

Wow! Did you read that?! We’re not even out of January and already we have an understatement of the year. That’s gonna be hard to beat when HP is selling PCs running Windows 7 under the banner “Back by popular demand!”

… but in the long term the approach could be a threat.

[long, blank, unbelieving stare]

How about the iPhone 5c looking like a Lumia? iOS 7 taking cues from Metro, including the app switching gesture from Windows Phone and the app shutdown gesture from Windows 8?

Even if this is true, O’Grady is way too old to be playing the “I am shocked—SHOCKED!—to find technology companies borrowing from each other!” And even if we allow these accusations to stand, suffice it to say that Apple is still far and away the largest net contributor to design concepts in technology.

I put the blame for the rudderless Apple squarely at Tim Cook’s feet. He’s an operations genius, but not the genius that Steve Jobs was. But to be fair, almost no one could fill Jobs’ shoes …

Never before has this argument been put forth with such rigor and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz …

All is not lost however.

Oh, thank God, because for a second there the Macalope thought all was lost.

Cupertino needs to reassure its developers and customers that it’s still relevant in 2014, or they’ll simply jump back in their self-driving cars, read news updates on heads up displays, and start dinner, laundry and feeding their pets remotely as they commute back to their climate controlled homes.

You know, sometime in 2025, when Google actually ships consumer-ready versions of those things.

Pretending is fun! But that doesn’t make it analysis.

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